Today I completed my senior ‘capstone’ thesis at Yale-NUS College. My topic was liberal education—a rather broad and ill-defined topic, but then again part of my project was to uncover what exactly is meant by the term, and what exactly constitutes the education I have supposedly received over the past four years. Supervised by Professor Pericles Lewis, the inaugural president of Yale-NUS, my essay attempted to shed light on the implicit means and ends of a liberal education, all the while moving beyond the kinds of platitudes one might find on a college website.

Two starting points of liberal education, and education in general, as I see them:

A liberal education is a self-reflexive education, defined by how one can question and critique one’s education from within (as I was doing with my thesis, for instance). Other forms of education do not feature this self-reflexivity, but are primarily a unidirectional transfer of knowledge.

The education that students ultimately receive and which faculty aim to impart is determined first and foremost by the way that liberal education is described, explained and discussed. This is because, stuck inside our education, we view as its end whatever ends are most visible to us.

These are ideas which have defined my approach to my own education. Perhaps they come as a result of having attended so many educational institutions, where one by necessity begins to see education from a broad perspective. And they are ideas that I tried to demonstrate and shed light on through the capstone, albeit indirectly: by focussing on assessing key rhetorics of liberal education in history, I hoped that both the self-reflexivity of liberal education and its ultimate ends would be reflected out of the project. The metaphor for it is best demonstrated by Velásquez’ Las Meninas, where the painter stands before the canvas he paints, and yet sees there himself, and his own reflection: the work is the beginning of a continual questioning and critiquing. My project was both a reflection on liberal education, and a reflection of one.

I end the paper with a call for a modern notion of Bildung, or self-cultivation, as Wilhelm von Humboldt and many of the German Romantics used the term. One of the key dichotomies in education today is how it must be both a private, selfish, individual education, undertaken for no other reason than one’s own personal development; but that at the same time we must educate ourselves to be societally useful, that is, to be useful as citizens. The tension is a defining one for the rhetoric of many educational institutions, and in the daily lives of many students: we want our education to be inwardly-focussed, but know we must contribute through our later work.

The genius of the notion of Bildung is that it links the one notion to the other: that by educating ourselves as individuals, we enable ourselves as citizens. It is therefore no longer either/or—either self-cultivation or citizenship—but one before the other (I have argued this in slightly different terms before). Bildung must be drawn out and untethered from its nineteenth century Romantic roots, but from it, I argue in my capstone, we can develop an institutional rhetoric that escapes the dichotomy. And of course, here we return to the two notions I started with—the self-reflexivity of liberal education and its ends achieved through discourse—for institutional rhetoric has the power to shape the education that we as students seek, and which faculty aim to impart to us.

Perhaps I will publish the thesis here at some point. At the very least, it has been interesting to build upon, in an academic way, many of the ideas that seem to have been floating around this blog since my high school years.

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About

Welcome. This is the personal website of Michael Moore-Jones. I'm a New Zealander and a Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Yale-NUS College. I've previously studied at Yale University and ten other academic institutions in six countries.